root vegetable boy

CHORUS MACHINE DEV LOG #10 - AUGUST 2024

Happy September, everyone! I burned the shit out of my dominant hand this month, so, things weren’t necessarily as productive as I would’ve liked... but progress was still made for sure ^_^

Here are a few things I worked on in August!

player death:

I did this at the very beginning of the month, as it was one of a few things necessary to release my first playtest. (more on that later!) like a lot of things I put off for months because I thought they’d be way difficult, this was a lot simpler than I’d thought it would be.

there are not a lot of moving parts to this! when your hp reaches zero, your player object is destroyed, and the death screen fades in. pressing enter at the death screen will reload your most recent save.

cutscenes and dialogue:

previously, conversations and dialogue in the game were pretty static, so I introduced an object called “obj_camerashift”. when called, this object can move both the camera & which direction the player is facing, giving the effect of the player “looking” at certain things mid-conversation.
I made a few other small changes to some dialogue-handling objects, as well. the aiming/shooting cursor now disappears when a textbox is on screen; I found being able to move the mouse around during conversations a little distracting, and I think it looks a lot more seamless this way. I also implemented an object that keeps track of plot/story related variables! surely I will not use intimate knowledge of the player’s actions against them ^_^

arson?

you can now set fires

fun for the whole family!

playtest one?!?!

do you guys remember last month when I said “I would love for people to playtest within the next couple months”
well... I actually moved way quicker than I was expecting and released playtest one at the beginning of August! I put out some feelers for who all would be interested back in July and was able to get a bunch of people to participate and share their feedback with me. I’ve been hearing a lot from fellow game devs about how important early and frequent playtesting is, and now i can finally say, with pride:
oh my god I get it. I am WAYYY to close to the trees. and I am so, so unbelievably grateful to everyone who took the time to test, because it really opened my eyes and gave me a much clearer picture of where things are at. let’s take a look at what people thought, and most importantly, what I learned! ^_^

standard enemies:

I chose to go with a goldilocks-style rating scale for the post-playtest survey. I felt like this would help me focus on the individual player’s perception and experience, because I had a lot of different ranges of skill level in playtesters. (my partner defeated the miniboss on their first try, but to my knowledge almost no other player was able to do this!)

this is a summary of responses about the difficulty of the small-scale enemies. I found it helpful to switch back and forth between the summary of all responses and individual responses when analyzing data, as often people would explain what occurence led to what choice. for example, i had one person rate Bug entirely “just right” for every category, and they explained in their written response that they enjoyed the threat level that the speed of the bug posed. I had another person rate Bug’s overall power & movement speed as “too difficult” for the same reason cited: the enemy’s speed! however, the person who found it too difficult also expressed that they don’t have much practice on keyboard & mouse games. you can start see where dev decisions start to get both more simple and more complex with access to all this info...
the summary of all responses is very helpful for analysis of overall player trends, though. I was pleasantly surprised that people tended towards finding the snake a little too easy overall (I love making things more difficult). I wasn’t expecting people to be so divided on the bug’s damage, so that’s one of the categories where teasing out individual responses is a little more helpful.

miniboss:

this is the most beautiful graph in the entire world to me right now.

the clear overall trend towards “just right” is so exciting for a first playtest!! it’s also a huge relief to know that the core gameplay is legitmately enjoyable. I had several people express that the miniboss fight felt rewarding because they were able to watch themselves get better at it. that feeling is exactly what I’m going for in terms of difficulty, because it’s one of my favorite feelings to have: knowing that it’s not any special levelling or number getting me through the fight, it’s just me and my skill.
though it’s really exciting to read about the aspects people enjoyed, I got a lot of insight from those that found this too easy or difficult as well. one person who found the fight too difficult suggested a small wait (”a breath or two”, they said!) between attack patterns, as they were getting very quickly overwhelmed. (I think this is a great idea!) I had another person who found the fight a little too easy in every category, and mentioned that they were able to complete the entire fight without using the player dodge mechanic at all. this is interesting to me because a lot of the people who seemed to struggle with the combat struggled with using the dodge mechanic specifically. actually, this is a pretty good segue...

player:

testers were rating the relative strength/weakness of each category offered here as opposed to “difficulty”. though, it’s sort of the same thing in this case...
anyway, as you can see, the dodge was pretty divisive.

I believe there’s multiple issues here that are compounding each other. the first is the dodge animation: it was very quickly drawn and I don’t think it gives anything in the way of juice or satisfaction to use. it’s also not even really an animation, I just change the player sprite to a static image depending on what direction they’re facing. because of this, there isn’t a clear “beginning of dodge → end of dodge” visual progression, so I think players get confused on when they’re actually invulnerable.
the second issue is the timed length of the dodge itself. playtesters only got 15 frames (or a quarter of a second) of invulnerability, which is just really difficult to consistently execute. this is especially affected by another issue about the player I had several people point out: the player hitbox was much taller than it was wide, so dodging attacks that were coming at you vertically became especially hard to pull off.
rest assured, playtesters, I have heard your cries! I have already changed the length of the dodge to 22 frames (a little more than a third of a second) and squashed the player hitbox significantly shorter. a full dodge animation is on the list of things to draw as well. hopefully these changes will help.

So it was less of a “work on actual game content” month and more of a “pace back and forth across my apartment thinking very hard about survey results” month. I’m glad it went this way though! It gave my hand some time to heal and gave me a lot to think about. I’m excited to tackle September. I don’t think I’ll do another playtest for at least a few more months, though... it was a lot of work to set up.

As a final note, in two months PROJECT CM will be one year in development... I’m thinking I will reveal the name of the game at that point. It could be nice to know what “CM” stands for...

That’s all for the August log. See you in a month!

Originally posted September 1st, 2024.